Obama on Rush and Fluke: I don’t like to see private citizens insulted for speaking up

AllahpunditPosted at 4:50 pm on March 6, 2012

He’s fine, of course, with private citizens being attacked by his own campaign if it helps squeeze extra cash out of liberal suckers obsessed with the “Kochtopus.” Granted, you can’t compare Fluke to the Kochs because they have endless resources at their disposal to fight back whereas she only has the Democratic establishment/major media eager to use her as a martyr for O’s “war on women” messaging in the fall, but what about, say, Joe the Plumber? Jonah Goldberg looks back:

You may recall that when Joe Wurzelbacher was approached by Barack Obama entirely accidentally, he became something of a political celebrity for having a philosophical disagreement with the president over spreading the wealth around and all that. Before long, the mainstream press went to battle stations to discredit the man. He didn’t even have a plumber’s license! (didn’t need one in Ohio). He had financial problems! He was a fraud! An astroturf plant! Blah blah blah. The Democrats, likewise, were unrestrained in their efforts to ridicule the man. Here’s Joe Biden ridiculing Wurzelbacher (and offering a tendentious argument about taxes)…

When average citizens are thrust into the political debate, they are heroes — if they confirm prevailing liberal arguments. When they run against the grain of the preferred narrative, they are ground down, caricatured, and treated to corrosive media skepticism.

On her Facebook page, Palin wonders re: Bill Maher, “Pres. Obama says he called Sandra Fluke because of his daughters. For the sake of everyone’s daughter, why doesn’t his super PAC return the $1 million he got from a rabid misogynist?” Well, we know why. I confess, after years of “teabagger” snickering, grotesque fingerpointing over the Tucson shooting, and most recently the high-fiving on Twitter over Breitbart’s death, it’s increasingly difficult to blog about these sporadic “civility” lectures. What’s left to say? They’re frauds. They care about “tone” precisely to the extent that it can be exploited to electoral advantage and no further. To write about it even to dump on them for it is to give them more credit than they deserve. Any questions?

Note the exchange at the very end here, too. If you can’t decipher all of it, John McCormack has a transcript. Turns out when O’s asked to critique right-wing rhetoric, he can muster a few thoughts, but when it comes time to weigh in on the “war on women” schtick being pushed by Debbie “New Tone” Wasserman-Schultz, suddenly he’s not in the business of arbitrating. Again, any questions?

Update: Commenters remind me that I forgot this golden moment of healing. At the rate we’re going, the DNC will end up turning that into an ad before the campaign is over.